this post was submitted on 21 Dec 2025
457 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
77904 readers
3229 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Bloat, they wasted an extra integer operation with
argc--.I think it's actually quite elegant. No matter what it has to skip over argument 0 which will be the executable name
echo.If the subtraction was removed and the loop changed to
<, it would then need to do an addition or subtraction inside the loop to check if it's the last argument.The real question might be whether the compiler was smart enough to change
var++andvar--into++varand--varwhen the initial values aren't needed.As compiler optimisations go, it's a fairly obvious one, but it was 1974 and putting checks like that in the compiler would increase its size and slow it down when both space and time were at a premium.
Well, good news, the source code is right there. Someone can go check (it probably won't be me)
I was going to guess the same regarding the time period.
Or they just drop the =